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A couple thoughts from Thomas Sowell

Everybody is talking about how we are going to pay for the huge national debt, but nobody seems to be talking about the runaway spending which created that record-breaking debt. In other words, the big spenders get political benefits from handing out goodies, while those who resist giving them more money to spend will be blamed for sending the country off the “fiscal cliff.”

I, too, am amazed at how spending gets a pass, even from folks like Warren Buffett who should know better.

Would Mr. Buffett give such a pass to a manager of one of his businesses who habitually spent 20% to 30% more than he took in and planned to do so as long as possible? In this case, would Mr. Buffett be so eager in volunteering his own income to continue to support such a manager so that manager could carry out his indefinite plan of spending beyond his means?

Here’s another good Thomas Sowell thought:

The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit — replacing what works with what sounds good.

I’ve seen the same with managers of successful businesses. New managers often ignore the actual success of the business they’ve been entrusted to run — what works — and change that business with their own ideas — what sounds good.

The typical outcome of that can be seen with JC Penney of the past year, where the new manager of JC Penney has made major changes to the business that sounded good, but have reduced the stock price by more than 50% against the S&P 500.

Intellectuals often have the same effect on society. For example, they may wish to ‘wage war on poverty’, but they ignore the best anti-poverty mechanism ever — innovationism (what works) — and instead seek to replace it with systems that sound good, but actually encourage poverty.